


Spectrum

by themocaw



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, F/M, Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut, Paragon Commander Shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 15:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/724689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themocaw/pseuds/themocaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four possibilities for Commander Shepard and Tali.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spectrum

# Red

Shepard, Hackett told her, wasn’t taking it well. That alone terrified him. What sort of hell could he have gone through that could have driven the indomitable Commander Shepard into near-catatonia?

He looked incredibly frail, lying in the isolation bed, his skin covered in burns and his broken bones slowly mending. But what terrified Tali the most were his eyes. She had seen Shepard angry. She had seen him terrified. She had seen him despair. 

She had never seen him broken.

Two weeks later, he was well enough to walk. She found him standing at the window of the medical frigate, looking out at the vast cloud of shattered steel that was the remnants of the once-proud Victory Fleet. He flinched as she put her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulder, but he did not push her away.

“You know what the worst fucking part is? I spent all that time convincing the Geth and the Quarians to make peace after two hundred years. To avoid genocide.” He laughed bitterly, mirthlessly. “To avoid genocide,” he repeated. “Hah.”

In the distance, the fleets were preparing for their long trips home. Tali closed her eyes and listened to Shepard’s slow breathing. 

When the sobs finally started, she was there to catch him before he fell.

# Blue

There is something strange happening on the Northern Continent, Admiral Zaal’Koris told Tali. Something odd.

“It was the damndest thing,” Zaal’Koris explained. “I know they’re saying that the Reapers are supposed to have started playing nice, but having one come out of the sky and start spewing drones caused a near-panic. But then they just started walking around and. . . well. You’ll see, Admiral.”

She knew what it was even before she saw it on the shuttle’s long-range sensors. She ran a hand over the kitchen countertop and walked through the living room, then stood at the window with the oceanfront view and gazed silently out at what was now her home.

“And you say they did this in a day?”

“Yes,” Zaal’Koris said. “Just walked out of the Reaper, built it, and just. . . disappeared. Went back to wherever they go when they’re not repairing mass relays.”

Tali put her thumb and first-finger of each hand up into a picture frame. She held it up to the living room window.

It was only then that she allowed herself to grieve for Shepard.

# Green

“Faith. It was Shepard’s greatest strength. Not faith in a God, or faith in another person, but faith in something much more frightening. Much more terrifying.

“Shepard had faith that all living things were inherently good. Even the Reapers.

“That concept may seem strange to those born after Synthesis. For you, the Reapers have always been the chroniclers of the knowledge of lost civilizations. But you must remember that in those days, the difference between organic and synthetic life was an insurmountable gulf. You must remember that, for organic life, the Harvest was an act of horror. The forcible destruction of one’s personal self, even for the sake of sublimation into a civilization’s memory-substrate, was a fate considered worse than the simple cessation of a linear point of view.

“The sin of the Reapers was their unwillingness to see that truth. The sin of the organics was belief that the only end to the cycle was a war to the death. The only person who was willing to make a different choice was Shepard. Only Shepard could have so much faith in the inherent goodness of all life that he could trust. . . could love. . . his greatest enemy.

"I saw that faith when he trusted in the inherent goodness of the rachni. I saw that faith when he trusted in the inherent goodness of the geth and the quarians. Both times, I was inspired by his conviction. But to trust the Reapers after all he saw. . . that level of faith makes me breathless.

“That faith uplifted us all.”

\- Excerpted from “Shepard: A Meditation,” by Tali’Zorah nar Rayya vas Normandy, published 279 A.S.

# Refusal

“Where did we go wrong?” Tali asked one night as she lay in his arms unmasked. She needed to feel his skin against hers again: the Normandy had just received word of the fall of Rannoch. Initial reports were that over five billion quarians had been harvested, and almost as many geth destroyed. It was just another loss in what was no longer considered a war, but a slaughter.

“Where did we go wrong?” Shepard repeated back to her. “Maybe we didn’t.” He hugged her even tighter as he stared up at the broken light tube in the Normandy’s ceiling that had needed replacement for months, and would never be fixed.

“Maybe this wasn’t our fight to win.”


End file.
